It's garden planning time again...

I know several of you ladies eat soybeans, but has anyone GROWN them? If so, where would I buy some to plant? Any help would be great.

I'd love to get this thread going again since it's almost planting time here!!!

Oh, Julie, I wish I could tell you I was in your shoes, but I'm not able to plan a garden yet! We're in the apartment still, and nobody is willing to help me water or weed in Lancaster, so I'm not replanting down there this year. It's totally depressing. I had a GREAT start there last year.

Go to www.territorialseed.com and check out their 4 varieties. You can buy sample packs of each, too. I was thinking "Beer Friend" sounded good.

I'm so jealous! Have fun!!!
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Stephanie-re-think your Lancaster garden! I'll help you if you still want to do it. :)

How cool of you to encourage me, Bonnie!

If Damon and I can hurry and spring-clean the Airstream, with the intent of going out there on weekends, at least for an afternoon, then it might be halfway possible to care for another crop.

I'd still have to build a drip irrigation system, and I haven't figured the costs yet. That way, I wouldn't depend on help for watering, which is much of the problem.

The other problem is that I have an entomologist father-in-law in Red Oak, who thinks nothing of bombing my crop with industrial chemicals--without asking. This happened a couple of times last August, and I had to stop gardening after that. Concerned that there may be residual crap all over the garden, despite his doctoral dismissal and insistence that the pesticides do not remain, I'm still worried that it may be tainted. And that I can't trust him not to treat the garden for me again!

It's a terrific ecosystem, if we didn't have a neighbor next door who plants acres of corn. He, too, uses old-school pesticides like my FIL did on the King Ranch (where he was head entomologist), and ****ed if he doesn't kill off everything, only to create a huge bumper crop of grasshoppers in late summer. I mean, they were EVERYWHERE. No more ladybugs like the thousands I saw in May. By late summer, all beneficials: ladybugs, lacewings, assasin bugs...all were gone.

Of course, it's hard anyway to garden during August. It's a dead month, really. But still, I remember it being a miserable time for gardening because of the grasshopper infestation. Why weren't the birds eating them? I couldn't draw any birds into the garden, and I only saw a couple of bats here and there.

I'm ranting, but still thinking about how I could beat the odds and try a 2004 garden. We planted on Easter sunday, all of us. Just to continue a ritual of that, alone, might foster hope for the remainder of the season each year.
I'll think about it, Bonnie!

I don't know much about the irrigation thing, but we used soaker hoses in our garden last year, so I could just turn the dang things on and leave them for hours without having to watch sprinklers or stand there with a hose. If you want to use them if you decide to plant your garden, you could use mine-they're just sitting in the garage.

Did you ever have leaks, or problems with spot-flooding? I remember using them in Houston to water my azaleas, and they worked great until they started popping holes.
Of course, if I carefully placed them and corrected drainage problems (so water would stay off the garden paths and in the soil where it belongs) then perhaps I'd have better luck. Last year I both used timers with hoses that had holes in them (didn't work well at all--too much runoff) and hand-watering (much better, because while watering I could hunt for tomato hornworms and other predators, or pick tomatoes, or get stung by thousands of mosquitoes--many times, all the above!)

Drip or soaker would be necessary, in other words, so I'll keep you in mind. You're not gardening this year at home?